Close of play
at the end of the second day of newly-promoted Worcestershire’s County Championship
match with Durham,
champions in 2008 and 2009. Somewhere in the home dressing room sits debutant Adrian
Shankar, no doubt tired from his exertions. He has just left the field
undefeated following more than two hours of hard graft in which he eked out 10
runs from 60 balls (including a pair of lapped threes off Ian Blackwell) against
a Durham attack that, at the time of his entrance, had reduced his team to 50
for 4, this after themselves having racked up the small matter of 587 for 7
declared in 137 overs. Backs were against the wall.

Amidst the
general moroseness at the Pears’ parlous position – both in the game and the
Championship, where they have lost the first five games – Shankar is (I
imagine) relatively content with things. At the age of 29 – although his
teammates of course think he is 26 (or he thinks they think he is, I think;
maybe he was oblivious, impervious to it all now) – this is a milestone
reached, perhaps a millstone cast off. After all, this is his first ever
Championship game, the natural culmination of a trajectory taking in twelve
first-class games for Cambridge University, a smattering of Second XI runs-out
(for six counties) and some 21 Minor Counties Championship appearances for
Bedfordshire between 2000 and 2006 (averaging 27.8). It is (I imagine) the
realization of a lifelong dream, a fantasy fulfilled (or
perhaps a phantasy), and bound, therefore, to bestow a certain amount of
satisfaction, a layer of existential insulation. These things are relative and
subjective, right? But I cannot imagine he is sitting particularly comfortably
there, in his county tracksuit, the black-and-green totem of Achievement that
(I imagine) had compelled his Abagnalean falsehoods, fibs,
fabrications, forgeries, fraud and fictions.

The previous
week he had played a first ever List A limited overs game – for the Worcestershire
Royals, as they were known at the time, at Lord’s
against Middlesex – although he had failed to glean any comparable crumbs
of success as the 10 not out from that game, which was televised by Sky and saw him bowled
through the gate by the third ball of the match after an unconvincing forward
defence had failed to repel Tim ‘Dial M for’ Murtagh. No Adrian’s Wall, that.

Doubtless the
decision to promote Shankar to both the team and the opener’s slot when Vikram
Solanki was unavailable had something to do with the strengths identified by
Worcestershire when they announced
the signing on their website on May 13, a press release that I would not be
surprised to learn had been outsourced, maybe even to as far away as Sri Lanka:

“The right handed batsman will join Worcestershire
CCC on the back of a highly productive off-season. Shankar spent the winter in Sri Lanka
gaining valuable experience and catching the attention of numerous counties.
Director of Cricket, Steve Rhodes, commented ‘Adrian
came to the Club’s attention during the winter, which he spent playing cricket
for Colombo in
the Sri Lankan Mercantile League. He was the leading run scorer in the twenty20
tournament with an average of over 52 and also scored three successive hundreds
in the longer form of the game. Adrian has the potential to develop further
after his recent winter experiences and is keen to make an impact across all
forms of the game going forward.’ The Cambridge
University graduate had risen through
the ranks of the Middlesex Academy and was later snapped up by Lancashire
CCC on a two year deal.”

The obvious
question at this juncture, one that a serviceable sleuth might have been tempted to ask, was: if he was being
monitored, why was he signed in mid-May? That trifle aside, there was
the other question, the question as to his cricketing merits. After a
twelve-match first-class career that had yielded 384 runs at 19.2 in a dozen games for
Cambridge – a figure significantly inflated by a career-best Varsity match 143 against
an attack that his own coach described as “unbelievably bad” (where otherwise it would sit at a tailenderly meagre 12.6) – this gritty 10 not
out against Durham must feel like a significant step forward, a summit scaled, a dream come true. But how might it be
seen by his peers? It would not be too fanciful to suggest that, some time later
that evening, a player with such a mediocre record, a player desperately trying
to “make an impact across all forms of the game going forward”, might reckon
they had what the snooker players would call a shot to nothing. With the rest
of the top-order gunned down (save Moeen Ali, who made 46), there was perhaps little
to lose – always perhaps, for any such loss is in some way a product of
the emotional investment therein – and much to gain. A breakthrough loomed. An
innings of substance. Everyone else had failed so you couldn’t really ‘fail’. Carpe Diem.

Here Shankar
was, then, finally playing 1st XI cricket. A window of opportunity. The man of mute deed would simply need
to summon the courage – the mad, leaping audacity – of the man of wordy confabulation
who had accompanied him step-by-step through life, exaggerating, berating,
mythologising, castigating. Those immaterial words, floating free as bubbles
across a summer sky – “a highly productive off-season ... catching the
attention of numerous counties” – would need to find some way of returning from
orbit and settling down alongside the actions of the earthly man, the man of
flesh-and-blood limitations.

South Northumberland
CC, Gosforth – 27 August, 2008

Adrian Shankar
is in the third game of a short trial period for Lancashire
in which he has so far made 39 not out versus Derbyshire and 19 against
Northants (out of 303 for 4). His prior Championship record at Second XI level
– for four other counties, including
Worcestershire eight years previously – is a none too convincing 249 runs
at 13.83, and against a strong
Durham side, with Mitch Claydon, Neil Killeen, Will Gidman and Luke Evans in
the attack, it promises to be a stiff examination – the sort of match, say, in
which you might easily look all at sea and play your way out of a contract.

At some point
early on day two Shankar hops over a low wall en route to the car park in order
to retrieve the ball, walloped there by some Durham batsman or other. A minute or so
later, he has not returned. A colleague runs over to help find what must be a
lost ball. It seems that, out of
everyone’s eye-line, Shankar has collapsed, for he is found whelping and groaning,
indicating that he has done something serious to his knee. He takes no further
part in the match. The next, against Yorkshire,
is a wash-out.

The season
finale is against
Surrey and, after both sides forfeit an innings, Shankar scores 46 from 138
balls against a new ball attack of Robbie
Frylinck and Tim Linley.
Only Gareth Cross, with 50, makes more, and Shankar – who opened the innings
with the coach’s son, Scott Stanworth, who made 9 – has evidently done enough to secure a two-year deal. However, he will
not make a single first-class or List A appearance for the Lancastrians.

While trialling
is the tried and trusted method for the aspirant professional cricketer to play
their way to a contract, so, too, is notplaying when on trial if you happen not to be quite good enough.

Bromsgrove CC – Saturday 14 May, 2011

Before he has a
chance to play for the Worcestershire First XI, Shankar is despatched to play a
game in the Birmingham League for Evesham (a club who, a couple of years later,
would field Saqlain Mushtaq) at Bromsgrove. Opening the batting with the 16-year-old Worcester Academy prospect Tom
Kohler-Cadmore (who took strike), he makes 4 runs from 16 balls, courtesy
of a single scoring shot, being dismissed before another Pears prospect and
future contracted player, Brett
D’Oliveira, could come into the attack. For the fastidious among you,
Bromsgrove won a tight game by two wickets. The upshot is that it’s only fair
to say that Shankar might not have been in purple form coming into the CB40
game at Lord’s.

New Road, Worcester – Friday 20 May, 2011 (circa
10am)

The shell-shocked
players of Worcestershire – five down and still 333 behind the follow-on target
– begin their warm-up. No doubt minds will be focussed on the threat of the
enigmatic Steve Harmison who, the previous evening, had prized out Pardoe,
Cameron and Ali in a spell described
by Vic Marks thus: “A fast bowler somewhere near his best dominated the
second half of the day. Steve Harmison … cruised down the hill, in rhythm and
in control, and took three wickets from steep bounce. No, he is not nudging the
selectors but it is still possible that he could win his county side another
championship.” This is not club cricket. Oh no. And there is also Callum Thorp to
contend with. And Ben Stokes. Pretty daunting. It’s the sort of challenge that
can induce anxiety, causing the release of adrenaline, re-routing blood to the
brain and heart, ultimately turning your legs to jelly.

At some point
in the routine warm-up, Shankar’s legs did indeed go from under him and, it was
reported, he suffered a cruciate ligament strain. With his county batting
reputation at its zenith – a zenith not quite approaching Felix Baumgartner
territory, it must be said – the fates would decree that he’d never play
another game for Worcestershire. This wasn’t really how he’d have imagined it
(I imagine). Zenith it may have been, but it wasn’t exactly bowing out at the
top. That night the club would be given a blow-by-blow account of his mendacity
and, it is presumed, would have afforded him the chance for an explanation. A
chance he responded to with even further-fetched lies and some genuinely
bonkers eleventh-hour ingenuity, although more on that later.

Worcester
– Thursday 26 May, 2011 (approximately 6pm)

With a certain
grim inevitability, Worcestershire announce the termination of the contract of
Adrian Shankar. Presumably, an internal investigation had been carried out (with
a little more thoroughness than the recruitment process, you imagine), after
which, it transpired, several aspects of his biography were fabrications
retrieved from far-flung lands of credulity…

The back story,
the broad sweep of events, is now well known. Indeed, looked at from a certain
angle, it’s one of the greatest cricket stories of our nascent century, if not
all time: a story about a county cricketer (just about) that was picked up by
Fox News, Talksport et al, and many facets of it have been treated deftly, humorously
and occasionally savagely. For a while after his sacking – I would say after the end of hiscareer, but around the time of the 2012 IPL auction he was still trying
to stir up interest among the franchises, with Andrew Strauss being asked by a
franchise for a reference and in turn asking Vikram Solanki, so you never can
tell – there was a spate of amendments to his Wikipedia page, as much of a
feeding frenzy as you’re ever likely to find in county cricket. Of course, satire
takes existing truths and exaggerates them into comedic realms; with some of
Shankar’s claims, the upper limits of credulity had already been surpassed.

Thereafter came
several excellent pieces delving into the why’s and wherefores; the scarcely
credible lack of due diligence on Worcestershire CCC’s part (I mean, a simple
check on Google would have blown the relevant parts of his CV – truly, a work
of art – out of the water); the megaporkies
he told to Luke Sutton to explain away why he was on the Young side in a 5-a-side
football warm-up; the parallels from other sports (Ali Dia, and all that). For
my part, I simply laughed at the gall of it all, the sheer brassneck. How on
earth do you front that kind of thing out? How does the arclight of public
scrutiny (much less self-consciousness) not cause the makeup to melt horribly? It
may be insane, but there was a certain admiration for the demented audacity of
it.

Once that audacity
– and, depending on your proximity to the story, to professional cricket, the
anger or indignation, too – had been fully absorbed, then, if you’re of
sympathetic disposition and don’t simply set up camp at derision, you’re left,
in the end, with pity. What kind of tugging compulsion and deficit of self-esteem
could lead someone to build such a megacity of lies without imagining that one
day they would be utterly engulfed by them? I mean, there are certain crimes
that not even Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11
team would entertain. How did he think he could pull it off? What sort of
blindness prevented him from the clear and obvious fact that he wouldn’t be
able?

These were –
and remain – the interesting questions regarding the curious case of Adrian
Shankar and his quixotic pursuit of the professional cricket that he wasn’t cut
out to play. Having concocted – and indeed dominated
– a mirage T20 tournament in Sri Lanka and forged documents to deceive
employers about his age; having found his way from the shadows to the stage,
what happened in that interval between his exposure – both on the square at
Worcester and in journalists’ fact-revealing calls to David Leatherdale – and his
ignominious (and, presumably, final) exit from the county game? What was Adrian doing to put out
the fires that were turning his Byzantine fantasy-world to ashes? What was
happening to him as this elaborate fantasy, spun into audacious ruse, started
to collapse round about him? For in such moments – moments when the soul, alone
and under assault, faces its own rigorous tribunal – whole lives are defined.